This world where your boomer parents retire to a beach house to drink margaritas, smoke designer weed, and play pickleball and ignore their offspring is the real aberration here.
That arrangement is not working from both sides. Younger generation wants autonomy and expects parents to not try to run things, not to demand more contact then they want etc.
Which makes sense. But you cant have it both ways - both autonomy/independence and service.
Younger generstion has their period of low responsibilities - before they create familly. It is shifted to later years tgen it used to ... but it is weird to then get jealous over their parents having some free time after work.
Now it’s little independent atomic cells doing whatever with little to no regard for the bigger picture.
Ultimatel, it’s the Boomer me generation that broke this tradition. It’s not weird for a millennial to look back and say “How nice of them to have their cake and eat it too” as I raise children alone and deal with the dilemma of how to treat their greed and selfishness as they age and demand of us while contributing little.
Thirty or forty year olds in the past wouldn't take any orders from their fathers or mothers. Of course they would help them, as they are family. But the elderly would absolutely have to step aside, and those who were in their prime would call the shots.
It is only in the previous 100 years where young people all over the world have the power to support themselves without anyone else’s help, which is why the preference for independence was revealed.
It is only very recently that the industrialized world became completely financialized, so that the cost of life has become artificially increased for the youth. Young people have always moved away from their families for marriage, or for becoming sailors, soldiers, miners, hunters, lumber jacks, etc. It was only the oldest son who would inherit anything, so the rest of them wanted to scram as soon as they hit puberty.
Inheritance-baiting your children is the oldest scam in the book, but people weren't complete fools in the past, and wouldn't stick around if the old folks went too far. A lot of head-butting between generations and in-family as you mention.
You do not know much about history, do you?
> Young people have always moved away from their families for marriage, or for becoming sailors, soldiers, miners, hunters, lumber jacks, etc.
Eh, for a bulk of history, people stayed in village where they were born. Women moved to husbands house, rarely other way round, but that is basically it. Miners and hungers and lumber jacks did not moved away from village.
And soldiers and sailors were tiny minority.
Of course young adults have always been able to support themselves. If people in their prime can't support themselves, then nobody can. Young adults have always supported themselves + other people.
Take any time period of history and any place, and there is a mobility which will surprise you. Evidence for this is for example the colonization of the New World.
And as I have mentioned: Only the oldest son would inherit the village farm, so the other sons and daughters were often anxious to get moving.
Maybe pre-property rights when an individual's ability to inflict violence was more correlated with their status, but not post-property rights when first mover's had an advantage in gaining ownership to be able to collect rent and have a group of able bodied young to enforce it (e.g. police). Once that dynamic is established, the game favors those who can benefit from previous generations.
After that, the option for a young person to support themselves is mostly based on expanding to unclaimed or lower priced land, which is a big gamble because it is usually unclaimed or lower priced for a reason (hard to reach, no infrastructure, enemies, climate, clean water, etc).
>Take any time period of history and any place, and there is a mobility which will surprise you. Evidence for this is for example the colonization of the New World.
The internet might have been the most recent world that was available to be colonized, but it is not clear to me that these worlds will always be available.
That would mean very old. They kept main decision power as long as they could. By the time they gave it away, they were not helping with childcare much. Instead, they were cared for. And even with that arrangement, you are ignoring younger sons, daughters and wife's. Because childcare part is not something that concerned men - it was women's area.
> Thirty or forty year olds in the past wouldn't take any orders from their fathers
Yes they did. The dad was 50, that is not nearly old enough to give up power even in your arrangement. And yes, they were frequently pissed about it.
> or mothers.
They were taking orders from mother in law. And if you look at less individualistic societies now, that is the source of large friction - mother in law vs sons wife. Where mother in law expect her to be, basically, a maid and she does not like that at all. A woman marrying into the husbands multigenerational family is the lowest person in the hierarchy of adults, basically.
Now many people I know are waiting until their 30s to have children, meaning that the grandparents are already 50-60s.
There are cultures where it is usual for grandparents to help where people are having kids in their mid twenties or later.
I know and have known lots of people who are perfectly capable of looking after kids (maybe not full time permanently), but for holidays or during the day, in their 70s or 80s.
In fact standard retirement age (insofar as it still exists) here in the UK is 67 so most people will still be working in their 50s and most of their 60s. It really is not that old.
Both grandparents divorced means you go from two family units involved to four-which in itself adds logistical complexity-and new partners doubles the opportunities for interpersonal conflicts
my (divorced) parents (5+ and 2.5+ hours away by car) didn't help us with kids at all (wife's parents are 7500 km away), but they can't expect I will be taking care of them when they will be really old, after all my father and his sister put their own mother to retirement home, when she could not live alone by herself, so they should kinda expect the same treatment (although I was against it and wanted grandma rather die alone in her house earlier than suffer slightly longer in retirement home without her garden/animals), actually my mother put her mother to retirement home as well, though I think she wanted to go there, it was pretty great facility, it was very small house (studio), each separated part had one occupant with minigarden with meals minutes away + it was also <1km from her old big house, so not much change and not much difference for her since she lived in front of the living room TV anyway